Voter Registration

Chris Ruane: To ask the Deputy Prime Minister how much his Department spent on steps to encourage voter registration in each of the last five years; and how much funding he plans to allocate for such purposes in each of the next four years.

Mark Harper: Electoral registration is the responsibility of individual Electoral Registration Officers (EROs). Local authorities have a duty to encourage participation in the electoral process and the Electoral Commission promotes public awareness of registration and produces research and reports on electoral registration issues. Electoral registration activity at the local level is funded through the Revenue Support Grant from central Government.
	The Ministry of Justice (responsible for elections policy until June 2010) provided funding through the Electoral Participation Fund set up in 2007-08 to support local electoral officers in undertaking their statutory duties. The following funds were provided from the Participation Fund: £934,742 in 2007-08, £544,392 in 2008-09 and £153,895 in 2009-10. A further £67,355 was spent in 2010-11 to support activities undertaken by electoral administrators to encourage participation at the elections which were held on 6 May 2010, but approved in the previous financial year. The Participation Fund was closed in the Emergency Budget of 22 June 2010.
	The Government have allocated a total of £108 million to meet the cost of implementing Individual Electoral Registration. This will fund EROs to make contact with each potential elector individually and invite them to register in 2014. It will also fund research to understand the current state of the electoral register and currently under-registered groups in order to ensure that as many people as possible are registered to vote. This year the Government are funding the piloting of 'data matching' of electoral registers against other data sources, such as the National Pupil Database and the Department for Work and Pensions database, to identify possible eligible electors, as well as looking at the ways in which we can make it as easy and secure as possible for citizens to register to vote, such as online registration.